Fall
by Vaecordia
Summary: "The way you sit at meetings, or stand around, or laugh or smile or speak. It's all strained, a mutilated imitation of who you used to be." (Anon Prompt: "love is indestructible", post-modern hypothetical future AU, Russia's POV. Dark, romance. Warnings inside.)


anonymous asked: _'love is indestructible' otp please if you still do them_

Oh my god. Oh god. The moment I started writing this, I didn't know where I was going to go - at first I had an idea but then it went off on a whole other tangent and it just became its own thing, and just... though it might have strayed from your idea, anon dearest, I tried to stick to it - in the end, it did come back to the original staring point. Hope you like it!

 **Warnings:** heavy-duty stuff here. Set in a hypothetical post-modern future, contains allusions/mentions of warfare, blood, gore, nuclear weapons, historical events, empires, dark!America, insanity/madness, imagery... Also has a romantic relationship. Ivan's POV. Enjoy!

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You've fallen.

Your country. Your people. Your might. Everything about you is chipping away. It's even become visible. The way you sit at meetings, or stand around, or laugh or smile or speak. It's all strained, a mutilated imitation of who you used to be. Your eyes, punctuated by a tiredness that wasn't there. Your smile, bent and lopsided and never reaching your eyes. Your laugh, accentuated by coughs that tear your throat. Your stance, hunched and defensive. Your voice and your words, muddled and avoiding and hollow.

It's both odd and unsettling, the subtle hints of your weakness - although they only make you more dangerous, don't they?

I would have liked to know when this all began. Was it when the war touched home, when you were no longer safe? Was it when your capital was breached, a first for a few hundred years? Was it when you no longer were infallible? Or was it before?

Was it when you were shouldering more debt than you could carry? When you were stretched beyond your limit, your army scattered around the world in places they do not belong? When your politicians' lies were more blatant than ever? When your economy flailed around innumerable times? When your money was spent on your weapons more than on your children?

Was it when you became who you used to be? Was it when you gained your independence? Was it when you rose to the top in such a short time? Was it when you suffered horrors unnamed as a mere child? Was it when you found the lucky openings to stick your foot into? Was it when that facade of a hero was first created? Was it when we stood toe-to-toe, face-to-face, gun-to-gun?

Was your demise a consequence of your rise?

I don't know - then again, I don't think you do either.

And it is unsettling, saddening and nostalgic seeing you like this. It is heart-wrenching to see the same signs I have seen only few times before, but always the same. Like the symptoms of a disease that you've caught, they become more defined by the day - the disease of greatness, the disease of power. But I can't say it doesn't become you.

You still wear the heavy crown with head held high. You own every room you walk into with that overflowing, unadulterated pride. A single word from you still tilts the balance of the world. But I can see the weight of the crown pressing down on your shoulders, how you strain to exert the force you need to keep your head up. I can see how you are soon drowning in debt, how the leverage Yao has on you is taking its toll. I see every other country mistaking that toll for a sign of your power, of your wealth, of your might, but I don't. There's few who remember the fall of Rome, but I know Yao does. I know Francis might - but he was so young, maybe he's forgotten. But we all remember the fall of the British Empire. It wasn't as dramatic as expected - it was a slow withering, and Arthur had silently stepped down from his throne. And you stepped up. It was so odd, the way the power balance had shifted, and suddenly Europe was no longer the centre of attention.

A young country, barely two centuries old, now standing tall, proud, and obnoxiously present. And had assumed a throne that many thought too big for him. I remember countries thinking you wouldn't last long. I remember them thinking you were just full of bright-eyed ideals and doomed-to-fail visions. I remember the things they said, the dismissive tones they adopted, the same tone that they kept for years and years just because they could not believe you had taken the crown, and wore it better and prouder than anyone ever had. It wasn't long before you had the world in your palm, twisted around your finger, and an ever-growing list of potential fifty-first states (and it was only a matter of becoming so by name, because you basically owned them already). But now, though the crown has darkened - be it with rust, blood, dust or ash - it is still there. You're haunted by a past you would rather forget. The American Dream, now shrouded in pain and suffering and death, the rotting corpses of your history its bloodied cloak. And you grow feral from the need to keep that crown on your head-

Because you _have to keep it_ , you need it to give you purpose and to give you worth.

And for years on end, it's been the same picture, the same pattern, the same repeat - each time worse than before.

An overheated economy, running rampant and wild, untamed and uncontrollable - consumerism through the roof, your industry and trade becoming more risky, more unchecked, more opportunistic and more leveraged.

A government full of cracks like canyons, with elections of instability, the lesser of two evils always the better choice (and yet, you rarely know who that lesser evil is) - men and women at each other's throats in the hopes of _just another year_ to pass another law depriving the less fortunate of what they need and raising your government's power higher.

Cities, rising to the sky, reaching for the stars like giants of steel and concrete. Power-hungry megalopolises, city life one of break-neck speeds. They reek of your might, your power, your days of glory, of shining buildings in a bloodied sunset. Their skies clouded by smoke, blanketed in a thick fog (that causes that racking cough in your lungs, lethal and dry).

A military damaged by its own weight. Men fighting for a cause long forgotten, clinging to the ideal of a free world - even when their own country is no longer free, and they know it (but won't acknowledge it). Folded flags the only proof of their battles, no progress ever really made.

The fear of being beaten coursing through your veins, clouding your mind.

And now, you are battling both your enemies and your demons, your weapons no longer trained overseas but at your neighbour, your borders collapsing and your infrastructure shattering and your society threatening to lay broken. Your finger always hovering threateningly over a dangerous button, key in hand and ready to twist the world apart. I remember that glint you had in your eye, back in those days, that daring, careless shine in your eyes the colour of a sky - a burning sky. You would so freely whisper promises of destruction to me, you would speak happily of apocalypse, you would bare your teeth at the idea of peace - because you can't survive without war. But for a while, it disappeared. You seemed to have changed, fooled everyone - even Kiku, even Arthur, even me, all people who had seen your ambitions and your darkness. The days when you'd sworn burnt cities and endless death were soon erased, long gone from memory. Your smile was as radiant as the sun, but we so quickly forgot it could be just as destructive.

But it returned. When the war, still far off to the east then, turned sourer than it had been, I saw the first fissure in your smile. The fracture in your calm eyes. I thought nothing of it, what with how fleeting it was. When the war expanded, you cracked again. And again and again and again, until it is now at your door - at everyone's door - and I see the man I recognised from so long ago. The man who had made brinkmanship into an art. The man who had teetered on the edge like a carefully-planned balancing act. The man who had put three words together, and with them signed both our death warrants.

Our death warrants, signed by the same hand that signed our marriage.

I remember the day we stood in front of both our leaders and a set of close nations, the quiet calm in the room disguising nothing, pretending nothing, when we each, in turn, said those words of an eternal bond. I remember the smile on your face, reaching your eyes for the first time in a long while, the diamond tears that you tried to laugh off (because you were both laughing and crying at the same time, you were so _happy -_ I _made_ _you happy_ ). I remember the first time we crossed your - our - porch as a married couple, and everything that followed - the sweet gentleness of our love, a night of pure bliss, both of us ignorantly happy for the first time in so long, too long. I remember the multitude of places we visited right after, the plethora of airplanes and ships and rental cars and your insisting we go to every place, everywhere we went, and going around the world, and ending with Moscow. And then the switching back and forth, one year in my country, another in yours - so as to keep it fair, keep it even, keep it equal (you so like your idea of equality).

I remember our bosses calling us in the middle of the night, us both going down to the White House, my leader on a phone call from Moscow. The news that shook our countries - no, our country, one single country of peace, an alliance so tight there was no differentiating it. And yet those news of war - of your war - managed to wedge a needle in between that alliance, sent me back to Moscow and drowned you with work in Washington. Your economy, that began failing so soon after - much too soon, you were so vulnerable and dangerous, even then. But I didn't notice it - we had too little time for each other. Our nations came first, ourselves second. And then began the race against time, your sending more and more troops overseas to contain the threat, but it was always too little too late, and I never saw you so panicked as I did in those days. And then, your enemy was on your part of the world, much too close for comfort, travelling up, higher, closer, further. You retreated into your country, your men and women prepared and ready for the incoming wave that would build.

We forgot you were the one with most enemies. We forgot it was a matter of time before they figured out there were many of them - far too many.

I tried to help as best as I could, and you would refuse help and deny needing it to your dying day. And yet, I would see you with badly bandaged hands, carefully picking up pens and shying away from writing when you could. The slowed movements of your fingers, the barely-there flinch of handshakes. And I would see your legs, trembling under your own weight, threatening to collapse any given minute. That one time, when your jeans were stained with blood and pus and skin and muscle, torn and out-of-place, when your eyes held the haze of nuclear power, the lust for incomprehensible might. Your eyes, glassy like the sands of your deserts after every new test, every test we thought would never have to come again, blazing with every explosion that brought you closer to death, closer to _being_ death. And it wasn't long before you seemed to have forgotten any semblance of the man you used to be, and had become a god - a terrible, great, magnificent and horrifying god, with power beyond life and death, power extending over the world.

But you were _still falling,_ and you couldn't understand why.

Those countries - they don't have the weapons you do. They don't have the resources. They don't have the same madness hiding in them, not the same determination, nothing you have. All they have is a relentless need to fight against you, and they will keep doing it until they die. Cities disappearing into ash and blood, regions obliterated, long range warfare your only hope, and the world descends into chaos. But I stand by you.

You claim you love me - and though I rarely doubt you do, I have my moments. After all, who could blindly believe the claims of a mad king? A mere boy, a child, whose eyes were tainted too quickly, whose mindless dreams and ideas were slashed with reality too fast, and whose being falls apart every passing day? You hide a snarl behind a smile, a glare behind a grin, weakness behind stupidity, failure behind dismissal. And yet, if there is one thing that has ever stayed the same, through time and hell and war and peace, it is love.

And some say love to be indestructible. I raise to them a glass, for I have no reason to believe otherwise - and we have tried. We've tried everything, everything that could have destroyed love, we've tested it, tried it, waited for it (hoped for it). We've gone through revolutions staining lands red, wars that tore our countries apart, peace that never really was there, mind-games that were little more than elaborate games of chess - moves and counter-moves, every time, all the time. Maddening times that drove us both insane, both of us hoping the other to provide support in the inevitable descent into lunacy. We came back, climbed back up, for a while, but you fell back down - and I couldn't help you. I wonder whether you ever really came back, or were you just in hiding?

But even despite all of that, despite everything that happened or didn't, everything that was built and that was destroyed, every city that fell and every government that rose, every day and week and month and year, every threat and every promise, every sweet nothing and every menace - through all of it, I have stood with you. I have watched your lows and your highs, I have seen your crimes and your repentance. I have seen every side of you, every aspect, every nook and cranny of you there is, and yet it still strikes me how complicated you really are. What we had - and still have - is a grand design. A mad, ingenious, and terrifyingly magnificent design. We would paint worlds across the night sky, we would dream of universes for ourselves alone, we would build cities in insane daydreams - all for us, and no-one else. And it seems as if those dreams are now the closest to reality as they ever will be.

The only thing we have not yet tried, is absolute destruction - the one thing we held over the heads of the world, the one thing we promised for decades. The one thing you threaten now again, the one thing neither of us is really afraid of (because we don't understand it, we can't understand it, so we don't fear it). And so perhaps this will be our last stand, our last chance, but we had to face it someday. Perhaps we will finally see how infallible love is. After all, it is a human emotion - and humans are but fleeting moments in time. But as nations, you and I have stood side-by-side or face-to-face for far too long to be fleeting. Maybe - maybe we can survive this. Maybe our love is indestructible.

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 **A/N:** well... this took me much, much, much longer than I thought it would. It was also both hard and easy to write - words came naturally, but it was just absolutely maddening to pull together. Everything, there was a lot of emotions going through me as I wrote this. Plus, it was a lot darker than I thought it would be. Just a few short explanations to those who don't know, or if it wasn't obvious enough (sorry, my fault):

 _folded flags -_ when American soldiers (and as far as I know, only American, I don't know of the procedure being anywhere else) are killed in action, their families receive a flag folded into a triangle.

 _the man who had put three words together -_ right, this is a mixture of two things. The term I really first was going for was "Mutual Assured Destruction", which is very defining of Russo-American relations for the better part of the last century. It basically assured the destruction of the world. However, it also alludes (as I like to think of it) to the words more commonly known as the three most important words: "I love you". So hey, either it worked or it didn't.

 _glassy like the sands of your deserts after every new test -_ if you detonate a nuclear bomb in the desert, the sand turns to _glass_ because of the heat and the pressure exerted on the soil. I mean I think that's pretty damn cool, plus a brilliant opportunity for some imagery right there.

But anyway, enough tattle about that, and now to my other updates: I will now focus on the next chapter of MAD - however, I have no idea when the update will be here. I am getting very busy with school and exams and stuff, which is taking up a lot of time and energy, and at the same time I've met a kind of writer's block. I know where I'm going with it, just not... how... to get there... But I will put it up as soon as I can, I am working on it, neither of my fics are abandoned, rest assured of that! Thank you for being patient with me, lovely readers!


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